I gotta remember to put those smileys in right after the stuff I write in
jest - apparently it makes all the difference.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 3:29
PM
Subject: Re: Repeater - "conditional
stop"
At 01:20 PM 7/26/2003, Nic Roozeboom wrote:
>I imagined
it would be only a matter of time before someone would announce
>they
had hacked OS1.1, and made all sorts of improvements... such as being
>able to configure one track as a MIDI looper...
yes, it's
amazing. It can't be that hard. Maybe you could take it on? After
all, the
Repeater is only a fully custom piece of hardware with its own
unique
system architecture, and code running straight on the silicon
probably
without any commercial OS in between. But that just means you
gotta know
how the hardware works to write the code and there's no OS there
to do
anything for you. Of course, no documentation is publicly available
on the
hardware architecture or the programmable logic parts. But heck,
with a
little patience, a multimeter, logic analyzer, scope, and a year or
two of
spare time you could probably figure out most of it. Then I guess
you
would have to decompile the machine code from the roms into
undocumented
assembler or maybe even C code. I don't know how well
decompilers work,
but probably the result will be messy and difficult for
humans to
understand. Hey, but no matter, if you had all the time to figure
out the
hardware, you've got time to unravel the code too! I bet it would
be fun.
Once you've got that figured out, then you can go about adding your
own
features. Careful now! this ain't wimpy windows programming. Real-time
embedded coding without a net! Everything you do has the potential to
throw
something else off, so you need to keep an eye on every clock cycle
and all
the possible states you could be in. Judging by the kind of bugs
they had,
there probably aren't many cycles left to play with, but there
must be a
few here and there. The Electrix guys only went a year over
schedule and
still had bugs trying to do this, so it can't be that hard
really. Oh, by
the way, did you catch the time when Electrix mentioned
they were out of
code space? Ah well, there are probably a few features in
there you don't
use anyway, so rip 'em out! Assuming you can actually
figure out which part
of the code they're in...
Sounds like a great
project!
kim
______________________________________________________________________
Kim
Flint
| Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com
| http://www.loopers-delight.com
|
